Teams use canned food to build Lincoln sculptures

Abraham Lincoln’s image is common throughout Springfield, but this week, three large sculptures pay homage to the 16th president with a twist — a reproduction made from canned foods.

Rhys Saunders

Abraham Lincoln’s image is common throughout Springfield, but this week, three large sculptures pay homage to the 16th president with a twist — a reproduction made from canned foods.

The displays at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library are part of a Canstruction food drive, which is a nationwide design and construction competition. Teams of architects, engineers and students compete to design structures entirely from full cans of food.

In Springfield, three area architectural teams have used donated food items to create the Lincoln-related sculptures, which are on display in the library atrium through Sunday.

The displays are free and open to the public.

A Bloomington-based team of employees for BLDD Architects Inc. created their design at the library Sunday, using 5,600 cans to build a birthday cake commemorating Lincoln’s Feb. 12 bicentennial birthday.

Team member Anita Lanning said the team has been working on the project for nearly five months.

“We started raising money back in December, and we ended up raising over $3,000 to buy these cans,” she said.

It only took one lunchtime brainstorming session for the group to come up with their design.

“One of our ideas was doing the penny, so we tried to think of something a little more creative that we knew no one else would do because what everyone else was doing was a secret,” Lanning said.

The four-tiered can-cake is arranged in order to pay homage to the former president’s life. The base layer represents his humble upbringing while living in a log cabin.

“The bottom layer of the cake is going to come out to the corners of the carpet, and the outside layer will be square,” said team member Barbara Meek. “It will be made with the coffee cans laying down on their sides so they look like logs.”

The second tier represents Lincoln’s growth in the prairies, while the 16 columns above it represent his rise to the White House as the 16th president. The columns support the top tier with 13 stars to represent the 13th amendment and abolition of slavery.

“We had to do a lot of calculating to figure out how many cans we needed because we had to order in bulk ahead of time,” Lanning said, adding that the group spent about 100 hours of volunteer time on the project.

“We spent a lot of time estimating to make sure we fit into our budget as well.”

Farnsworth Group Inc. created a display modeled after a bust of Abraham Lincoln, which uses the various canned goods to create a representation of Lincoln in an outline of Illinois to show the historical association between the two.

A third display, created by Ratio Architects Inc., shows the Lincoln penny.

Once the displays are taken apart, the canned food will be donated to the Central Illinois Foodbank.

Rhys Saunders can be reached at (217) 788-1521 or rhys.saunders@sj-r.com.